Migration Central

Making the Move

At a high level, the process of migrating to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is virtually the same whether an organization is moving a single application or a complex collection of integrated environments. Every cloud migration requires key steps like assessment, planning, target environment provisioning, and cutover. But the details of each step may vary significantly depending on what type of environment is being migrated.

Let's take a close look at the phases of the cloud migration process and the various options for carrying out each step.

2. Source Capture and Preparation

It's important to capture each critical component of the source environment and prepare them to run natively in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. How the preparation is accomplished depends on the migration pattern being used. There are two high-level patterns for migrating existing applications to the cloud. They include:

Application-agnostic migration
Application-agnostic migration involves migrating physical and virtual machines (VMs) from the source environment to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure without considering what is running in them. Most applications will continue to function perfectly, provided that all related VMs or physical machines are migrated at the same time, and that private IP addresses and host names of source machines are kept intact.

Insert Virtio drivers needed for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure into the captured boot images and make any other necessary configuration file changes.

Convert captured boot images to a format that can be launched in a VM in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

These steps can be carried out manually or with automated migration tools from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure partners like Cloudbase and RackWare. The automated tools handle all capture and preparation processes, launch the captured images into Oracle Cloud Infrastructure VMs, and attach all required NICs and block storage. The tools also apply necessary configurations to private IP addresses, host names, NICs, and storage. Automated tools are highly recommended for organizations migrating a large number of VMs.

Migration teams can capture VM images using capabilities available in their hypervisor. VMWare, Microsoft Hyper-V, OVM, Xen, and KVM provide tools for exporting VMs into portable files. Export the VM images as VMDK or QCOW2 files. Some organizations may be unable to directly export VM files into one of those formats. For example, in the case of Hyper-V, the format will be VHD. In these cases, migration teams can use a conversion tool like "qemu-img" to convert the image to VMDK or QCOW2 formats. For manual migration of physical machines, organizations should first capture the physical machine as a virtual image using common physical-to-virtual (P2V) tools. Then follow the same steps required for virtual machines.

Configuring VMware environments to run natively in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure VMs using Oracle infrastructure components can drastically reduce TCO while still providing the benefits of an enterprise-class cloud environment.

Migrating most VMware environments to Oracle's cloud is easy with tools available from partners like RackWare, ATADATA, Cloudbase, and Corent. These tools automatically export VMware VMs and all attached storage, converts them to run natively in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and launches them in the chosen Oracle VM shapes.

Source capture and preparation for application-aware migration

During an application-aware migration, VMs and physical machines will never be captured or migrated. Only data and specific configuration files are captured and prepared for migration. The migration tool being used will deploy a new instance of the application in the Oracle environment, or use an existing instance of the application in the target environment. There are several application-aware migration tools available in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, including:

Migrating Oracle databases from AWS to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is easy. Migration teams can choose from a large collection of industry-standard tools that can help, such as GoldenGate, Data Guard, RMAN, and Oracle Data Pump. The correct choice of migration tools depends on factors like the version and size of databases, bandwidth and connectivity, and the amount of downtime an organization can tolerate. Read this whitepaper for expert advice on migrating databases from AWS to Oracle.